This Story About Ben Carson's Role in the Trump Administration Is Damning

The irreplaceable Alec MacGillis has turned up at New York magazine with a look inside the abandoned hazardous waste facility into which Dr. Ben Carson has transformed the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That this is deliberate seems beyond question. It begins with an anecdote in which former secretaries of the department take Carson out to dinner to see precisely how much plastique he was planning to plant under their mutual legacies.

The tone was collegial, built on the hopeful assumption that Carson wanted to do right by the department. "We were trying to be supportive," Henry Cisneros, from the Clinton administration, told me. But it was hard for the ex-secretaries to get a read on Carson's plans, not least because the whisper-voiced retired pediatric neurosurgeon was being overshadowed by an eighth person at the table: his wife, Candy. An energetic former real-estate agent who is an accomplished violinist and has co-authored four books with her husband, she had been spending far more time inside the department's headquarters at L'Enfant Plaza than anyone could recall a secretary's spouse doing in the past, only one of many oddities that HUD employees were encountering in the Trump era. She'd even taken the mic before Carson made his introductory speech to the department. "We're really excited about working with — " She broke off, as if detecting the puzzlement of the audience. "Well, he's really."

It gets really weird after that.

The most influential of the new bunch, it would quickly emerge, was Maren Kasper. Little-known in housing-policy circles, and in her mid-30s, Kasper arrived from the Bay Area start-up Roofstock, which linked investors with rental properties available for purchase. It partnered with lenders including Colony American Finance, a company founded by Tom Barrack, the close Trump associate. This link to Trump, combined with Kasper's background in one sliver of the housing realm, was enough to win her a place as one of the minders appointed by the White House to keep an eye on each government department, a powerful role without precedent in prior administrations.

Kasper, the holder of an M.B.A. from NYU's Stern School of Business, took her new management role seriously, asserting herself as the final arbiter in the absence of a confirmed secretary. This led to friction both with career housing-policy experts and with Carson loyalists, notably Singleton, who had also been hired on. At meetings, Singleton said, Kasper was often "misrepresenting" herself as standing in for Carson. "I made it clear, 'You don't speak for Dr. Carson.' She said, 'Well, the White House …' " To which Singleton said he responded, "I get what the White House has selected, and I respect that, but he's the secretary and you need to make sure you understand that." That friction lasted only so long. In mid-February, an administration "background check" on beachhead-team hires turned up an op-ed critical of Trump that Singleton had written for The Hill before the election. Security personnel came to notify him that it was time to go.

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From the beginning, it was clear that this administration thought of HUD—and, by extension, the millions of Americans who are its clients—as an annoying afterthought filled with people who didn't vote the right way. So, it put Carson, the man who thought the pyramids had been built as triangular siloes, in charge all federal housing projects. And it surrounded him with people who were equally dim. Morale spiraled in.

Finally, there were the clock-punching lifers, the "Weebies" ("We be here before you got here, and we be here after you're gone"), who recognized a chance to start mailing it in. "It's 'I can now meet people for a drink at five,' " said Tregoning. Or, as a supervisor in one branch office put it: "As a bureaucrat, HUD's an easier place to work if Republicans are in charge. They don't think it's an important department, they don't have ideas, they don't put in changes." Left unsaid: that such complacency was an unwitting affirmation of the conservative critique of time-serving bureaucrats.

This is a shrewd observation by MacGillis of the general approach to government that conservatives have followed ever since Ronald Reagan gave them the green light in his 1981 Inaugural Address. Hell, it's what they've been doing to the Affordable Care Act ever since it passed. You sabotage a law, or a policy, or an entire department and, when it breaks down, you point and say, "See, government doesn't work."

After word emerged in early March that the White House was considering cutting as much as $6 billion from the department, Carson had sent a rare email to HUD employees assuring them that this was just a preliminary figure. But as it turned out, Carson, as a relative political outsider lacking strong connections to the administration, was out of the loop: The final proposal crafted by Trump budget director Mick Mulvaney called for cutting closer to $7 billion, 15 percent of its total budget. Participants in the Section 8 voucher program would need to pay at least 17 percent more of their income toward rent, and there'd likely be a couple hundred thousand fewer vouchers nationwide (and 13,000 fewer in New York City). Capital funding for public housing would be slashed by a whopping 68 percent — this, after years of cuts that, in New York alone, had left public-housing projects with rampant mold, broken elevators, and faulty boilers.

"By the time I left, almost 90 percent of our budget was to help people stay in their homes," Shaun Donovan told me. "So when you have a 15 percent cut to that budget, by definition you're going to be throwing people out of their homes. You're literally taking vouchers away from families, you're literally shutting down public housing, because it can't be maintained anymore."

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